Advanced wireless devices may have multiple radios that operate on the same, adjacent, or harmonic frequencies. The radios may provide access to networks such as wireless wide area network (WWAN), a wireless local area network (WLAN), a wireless personal area network (WPAN), Global Positioning System (GPS), Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), etc. Some combinations of radios can cause co-existence issues due to interference between the respective frequencies. In particular, when one radio is actively transmitting at or close to the same frequency and at a same time that another radio is receiving, the transmitting radio can cause interference to (i.e., de-sense) the receiving radio. For example, same-band interference may occur between Bluetooth (WPAN) and 2.4 GHz WiFi (WLAN); adjacent band interference between WLAN and Long Term Evolution (LTE) band 7, 40, 41; harmonic interference may occur between 5.7 GHz ISM and 1.9 GHz Personal Communications Service (PCS); and an intermodulation issue may occur between 7xx MHz and a GPS receiver.
Active interference cancellation (AIC) cancels interference between a transmitter radio and a receiver radio by matching gain and phase of a wireless coupling path signal and in a wired AIC path, as shown in FIG. 1, where dt is a transmitted signal from a transmitter (aggressor) radio 102, and hc is a coupling channel (wireless coupling path signal) from the transmitter radio 102 to a receiver (victim) radio 104. AIC 106 attempts to cancel the impact of the coupling channel hc as reflected via the negative sign on the output of AIC 106.
AIC may be implemented with respect to RF (radio frequency), baseband, or both RF/baseband. AIC in baseband typically only shows limited cancellation performance because the coupling path signal is much stronger than the desired signal strength, easily resulting in the saturation of an LNA (low-noise amplifier) and an ADC (analog-to-digital converter). AIC in RF can provide better cancellation performance. Prior art RF AIC techniques include difference calibration methods, such as direct channel estimation and cancellation method, binary search the coupling phase, and LMS (least mean squares)-based adaptive filtering methods.